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To: socgrad@csf.colorado.edu
From: Douglas Sadao Aoki / Lucy De Fabrizio <stumpy@mail.unixg.ubc.ca>
Subject: Re: Areas of interest/prestige
Message-Id: <E0wgh7X-00014p-00@mail.unixg.ubc.ca>
Date: Tue, 24 Jun 1997 18:43:44 -0700
At 08:12 AM 6/24/97 -0400,  Thomas F Brown wrote:

>Are we going to judge our status by how much literary studies borrows
>from us? I don't see the relevance. Are we writing science or literature?

The prestige and status of any discipline will be worked out in the
discursive politics of the academy, especially in the relations of that
discipline vis-a-vis others. Literary studies holds no special place in that
process; I just invoked it because it has been much more successful in
dominating recent social theory. Why that has been so would be an
interesting question. One thing is for certain: no discipline can determine
its own prestige and status independently.

As for science and literature, I think that sociology becomes both much less
interesting and definitively unsociological when it limits itself to being a
science. Of any discipline, surely sociology should recognize that science
is not some totemic path to knowledge, but a particular social regime of
truth. This doesn't mean that sociology-as-science isn't valuable, but it
does mean that sociology should be obligated to think about the presumptions
that science is grounded in.

A good example is Thomas's last question. The point is, we are writing,
period. Science has been very suspect in its dealings with language, reading
and writing. It makes common-sensical and troublingly transcendental claims
about the nature of meaning, communication, clarity, and standards for
writing--just as Thomas, in an earlier post, made a transcendental claim
about the nature of research. If language is trickier and more fraught than
that--as, dare I say, literary studies has carefully considered--then there
are serious consequences for our view of research, knowledge,
disciplinarity, etc. Again, surely sociology should be the discipline which
is most aware of this. After all, one of its commonplaces that language is
the prototypically social entity.


------------------------------------

Doug Aoki
Department of Anthropology and Sociology
University of British Columbia
Vancouver, BC
CANADA

stumpy@unixg.ubc.ca